


the wraiths at bay

by serenfire



Category: The Umbrella Academy (Comics), The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Ben Hargreeves Deserves Better, Blood and Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Child Soldiers, Childhood Trauma, Drug Use, Gen, Ghosts, Hurt/Comfort, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Pre-Canon, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-16 06:59:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18089612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenfire/pseuds/serenfire
Summary: “Roll me a joint,” Vanya says.Klaus laughs, high and cracking. “I’m such a bad influence on you.”Or:How Ben dies.





	the wraiths at bay

“Roll me a joint,” Vanya says.

Klaus laughs, high and cracking. “I’m such a bad influence on you.” His hands already grasp at the hidden alcove behind the windowsill, remnants of a childhood spent scraping out space to hide packets for easy access.

Klaus isn’t a child any longer, barely — and what a birthday it’s been.

They sit in the bathroom, Klaus dangling his legs off of the side of the tub. Vanya balances on the counter, tucking her chin behind her knees.

Klaus pulls out cigarette paper and a bundle of weed from a space Vanya didn’t know existed and methodically takes a sheet out, placing a clump of grass onto it, and starts to roll, crinkling the paper.

“Careful,” Vanya says, and Klaus’s hand shake at this, trembling the cigarette paper, producing an off-balance rhythm of papery percussion. “You’re bleeding on it.”

Klaus looks down, the world awash in a blur. Shadows creeping into the edge of his unfocused vision, forming something that will become a phantom limb if he doesn’t act fast enough. But sure enough, a bright drop of red has landed squarely in the middle of the roll, and another follows it.

He presses a shaking hand to his forehead, and it comes away lathered in blood.

“Hey, maybe we should get Mom to stitch you back up—”

“It’s fine,” Klaus interrupts. He clenches his jaw. _They threw me out, they told me to go home, I couldn’t help them—_ “It’s not from the mission.”

The tremor starts from his forehead, from the dripping gash down his eye, and spreads to his elbows, to his hands, to his knees. The joint falls and hits the floor, uncurling. The shadows affix themselves to the corners of Klaus’ vision. He can almost hear them begin to say his name.

Vanya reaches down and picks it up. She looks at him. She hesitates. “You need this more than I do.”

On autopilot he grabs the joint, he procures a lighter from behind the soap stand, he lights the weed within five seconds.

Vanya watches him, silent. The only sound in the room is Klaus’s breathing, ragged, irregular.

“You don’t do this after every mission,” she says.

He takes a breather long enough to cough, “Ah, but today’s my birthday.”

“You got injured, it must have been bad.”

Klaus focuses on the tearing, bleeding edges of his fingernails instead of her. Anything else in the room instead of her. A sound comes out of his throat that reminds him faintly of a laugh. “Oh no, not for me,” he says, “I’m the one that got out.”

 _Klaus_ , the shadows say. _Klaus Hargreeves. Listen to us. Klaus—_

“Klaus!” Diego shouts, a flurry of motion in the night. “Get out of the way!”

Klaus ducks his head down, narrowly missing a shot of gunfire that bursts, spraying the cement wall above him.

He ducks behind a dumpster, looking at his hands. His rings shake wildly, clanking against one another. The fresh tattoos stare back up at him—HELLO, GOOD BYE.

He turned eighteen not six hours ago—scheduled the tattoo appointment for midnight exactly—walked out of it, dizzy and high on adrenaline and codeine and immediately got the call to assemble as he snuck back inside the Academy’s walls. Klaus is crashing, and there is nothing he can do to help the team.

Knives whiz over his head. The dumpster rattles as a body slams into it, sliding to the ground. Diego runs up, pulls the knives out of the man with a _schlunk_ , and locks eyes with Klaus.

“What are you doing?” Diego hisses. “Help us fight!”

“Oh, dear brother, what am I supposed to do? They have an arsenal!”

As if to punctuate his words, a machine gun clicks and Diego drags Klaus to the ground next to him. More bullets shoot across the scene, concrete chipping away from the houses that line the alley.

On Diego’s comm, Ben’s voice buzzes. Small. Hesitant. “—Just the start of them,” he says with the static. “The entire place is—”

“Ben!” Klaus screams, scrambling up. “Ben, where are you?” Dawn is just beginning to crest over the city, but Klaus can only feel the heat of the oncoming sun; he can’t see it. His entire vision is blocked by ghosts, the new ghosts of the knifed men climbing out of their dead bodies, the mangled ones mauled by themselves—instructed to by Allison—twitching and refocusing. On him. All around him. They’ve been here for—an hour? A day?—and there are so many already, blocking Klaus’s vision. He doesn’t know where he is.

“You want to help?” Diego asks, and curls a hand around his. Klaus looks down. A dagger is in his hands. Huh. Nice. “You need to—what are those, are those tattoos on your hands?—you need to help one of the others.”

“You don’t require my assistance?” Klaus stands up, unsteadily, grasping at bricks, feeling them tumble to the ground. His tattoos are fresh, and he’s sure he’s mangling them, but he can’t feel them, so everything is fine.

“I work alone. Go find Ben and haunt him.” With that, Diego disappears, and more ghosts come to close the gap. Reaching at Klaus. Their fingers, elongated, blown off, outstretched, reaching, oh so close.

“Ben!” Klaus screams, turning from them and running blindly. “Where are you? Ben!”

In the dust ahead, a tentacle whips around, slamming into the side of the wall, squeezing.

Follow the tentacle.

Klaus holds his knife, both freshly tattooed hands keeping the rattling weapon in check. He inches forward, the ghosts behind him, but more clawing out, one from the end of the tentacle. All staring at him.

Klaus steps in a doorway at the end of the alley, and it is dark as death. Klaus turns around—the ghosts shield the doorway and the only source of light. He turns around. A tentacle snakes out of the dark and attacks a ghost—or, no, that’s a living person, choking now, surrounded by the horror of Ben’s powers.

Follow the tentacle.

The living person smashes against the floor, and a ghost rises from it. He is set on Klaus.

Klaus turns and runs in the direction of Ben, away from the monsters that follow him.

A light in the distance, and Klaus can see Ben, screaming, his powers surrounding him completely, engulfed in a sea of it. They burst from his face, his neck, tearing holes through his clothes. So many. So much more than Klaus has seen before.

And the villains keep coming. They keep running towards Ben, like an Uzi is any good against a mass that works on raw emotion, able to sense the entire room. Klaus stands next to Ben, and his brother’s face is slack, shining with blood, limp in the arms of his powers.

Klaus holds a knife. Why is he holding a knife again? What good could he possibly do with a knife? This isn’t a kind of mission he can gather intel for, it’s a mission that just requires killing. So much killing.

“How are you holding up?” he asks Ben.

Ben is silent except for the _schlick_ of his tentacles as they extend, kill, and recede.

Klaus surveys the carnage. “Guess you haven’t killed this many before. You usually—” Klaus taps on Ben’s shoulder, but Ben doesn’t respond. “Hmm, that usually seems to work.”

The ghosts are back, an army of them. The last time he’s seen this many was within the mausoleum, and dead people lived there. This was just a hideout. A hideout with so many people that they have killed in such a short amount of time.

Klaus inches closer to Ben. Maybe he’ll keep the wraiths at bay.

Ben doesn’t respond. In fact, he gets weaker, more limp, as Klaus gets closer. Klaus can see Ben twitching, and it reminds him of looking in the mirror most mornings, having gone ten hours without food or drugs and shaking so that his body can produce heat.

But Ben is muttering.

“No, not him, take anyone, not him—”

Take people? “I’m not taking anyone,” Klaus says slowly.

A tentacle comes out of Ben’s arm and wraps around Klaus’s wrist.

“Wait,” Klaus breathes.

Footsteps echo in the room and Ben’s tentacles surge to attack the new invaders. They come back with the sounds of cracking and screams, and throw twenty bodies at Ben’s feet.

Klaus steps back.

Ben breathes more heavily, he tilts his head and listens. His tentacles grow upward, bursting through the ceiling, and drag a handful more goons down.

“Ben, listen to me,” Klaus starts, resting a palm on Ben’s shoulder.

Ben’s body jerks away like a puppet, and a tentacle turns to Klaus, catching him on the forehead.

Ben screams, tearing against himself. The tentacle loosens, but another grabs Klaus by the neck.

He’s choking, Ben’s choking him—

Klaus takes the dagger in his hand and slashes the tentacle, and it drops to the ground. Ben doubles over in on himself.

Klaus doesn’t know what to do. They have never faced this many enemies at once before. Klaus can’t do anything to help.

Behind him, Luther grabs Klaus by the shoulder. Klaus misses him with the dagger by an inch.

“What are you doing?” Luther hisses. He’s drenched in blood and he holds a machine gun. “That’s Ben!”

“He tried to attack me!” Klaus screams at him.

“He _what_?”

“They’re usually contained, but—I don’t know—so many bodies. They’ve been active for so long.”

Luther looks around the room, following Klaus’s search for bodies closing in around them, but he can’t see them. That’s a privilege only reserved for Klaus.

“You need to leave,” Luther says. “We’ll handle this.”

“But—” Another tentacle wraps itself around Klaus’s dagger hand, flinging the dagger into a nearby wall.

Luther raises his gun and shoots at the tentacle. It whips back and pulls the gun out of Luther’s hand.

“Get out!” Luther screams. “You can’t help here.”

“What do I do?”

“Go home! We’ll finish up. We always do.”

 _We always do_ , echoes in Klaus’s mind. _We’ll finish up. We always do._

“Wow,” Vanya breathes. Klaus looks at her, seeing her for the first time in the minute of his frantic storytelling. She always was a much better storyteller than he was.

Klaus lifts the joint to his mouth again. Breathes. His tattoos are fine, but under his tattered uniform, his wrists are swelling with ugly red marks.

“So you left them there?”

“They didn’t need me. Luther made sure to personally tell me that.”

A loud banging on the door. Klaus coughs and tries to hide his joint behind his ear.

Vanya looks between him and the door. “What are you doing?”

“If that’s Pogo coming in—”

Vanya stands, opens the door. She turns around back to him. “Klaus,” she says, “there’s no one there.”

As she shuts the door, Klaus sees an outline of a human form behind the door. His chest burns.

“God, this should be working better than it is.” He offers a weak smile at her and breathes it in again.

There’s another knock at the door. Klaus flinches once more.

“Still no one here,” Vanya says, soft.

Another rap. Louder. More insistent. Paired with a voice—a warbling, forming voice— _Klaus. Klaus!_

Klaus smoothes a hand over his unruly hair, coating it in blood. “They’re here. This should—this always makes them go away, but no, they’re here again. God. I. I need something stronger.”

He heaves to his feet, opening the bathroom cabinets. “They’re here somewhere,” he hisses. “I can’t. Not right now.”

There’s banging on the window, now, too, the windowpane rattling. Klaus keeps his vision firmly planted on the cabinet in front of him. A bottle of make up remover, a box of tissues—there it is. Klaus pulls out a plain white bottle and unscrews the cap.

His vision tints at the edges.

Vanya says, “Maybe you shouldn’t take all of that.”

Klaus looks down in his hand, as blurry as ever, and to his surprise, he has poured himself a handful of pills. “Try me,” he breathes, and inhales them.

Vanya takes the bottle from him and inspects it. “What is this?”

Klaus braces against the edge of the sink, closing his eyes. The percussion of the ghosts increases, and increases, to a louder and louder volume. He shrugs.

“Then why did you take it?” Vanya snaps.

Klaus lazily opens one eye and stares into the mirror. He’s beaten up, split lip, road rash, one eye swelling. Peachy. Bleeding. The corners of the mirror freeze over, and Klaus reaches up to wipe the condensation off. The condensation doesn’t wipe away. Which means that it’s only visible to Klaus.

He slowly turns around.

An army of ghosts clutter around the window, all screaming now, pulsating as one. Klaus screams and stumbles against the door.

At that moment, the klaxons in the mansion blare, calling all to attention. Klaus presses his hands to his ears. He just wants to go to sleep.

Vanya picks him up. “It’s important,” she says. “You’re part of the Academy. You have to go.”

Klaus is starting to fade away from reality. Even the blaring siren sounds like a melody. When he looks at the window, he can only see shifting shadows again.

“Do you hear screaming?” Vanya asks.

Klaus can’t hear anything, and it’s so peaceful.

“You need to report to duty.” Vanya pulls him out of the bathroom and down the hall. “Oh my god,” she breathes, and pulls him faster.

Whatever she’s reacting to, Klaus can’t hear it. It’s all a quiet rush now. An uplifting mood.

When they reach the stairs, Klaus’s vision materializes. As he grasps onto the banister to maintain movement, he can see Luther burst into the door, holding something in his arms. Reginald and Mom walk quickly from the other side, Reginald barking orders.

“It’s Ben,” Vanya says, and Klaus pitches himself down the stairs. He might stumble. He might fall. He’s not paying attention. But he is at the bottom of the stairs, and following Luther to the infirmary, as Luther screams and holds a vague shape in his hands.

Ben is strapped down to a gurney, an IV inserted into his arm. Mom boots the heart monitor up, but there’s just a flat line. No pulse.

“What did you do?” Klaus screams. He’s on his knees, now, unable to stand. His vision is white on the edges, the drugs kicking it.

Luther looks morosely at the table. “He was out of control. I had to—I had to cut the tentacles off.”

And Klaus can see Ben now, in focus. The tentacles haven’t receded like they do every time after a mission; they are just stumps. Bleeding. Bleeding Ben out.

“Get the paddles,” Reginald tells Mom.

Pogo tears Ben’s uniform shirt off of him, and Klaus can see the twitching stubs of tentacles covering him, all dead. Just like him.

“Clear,” says Mom. She brings the paddles down and Ben’s body twitches.

They’re all there—Klaus, the other four siblings, Ben. They’re all in this small room not made for this many people, and they’re all holding their breaths.

“He wasn’t human,” Luther murmurs, like anyone’s listening to him. “He was targeting us, he couldn’t control it—so I had to.”

“Clear,” says Mom again.

Klaus reaches out to hold Ben’s hand, and it is unresponsive. Klaus chokes on his tears, the world twisted one hundred and eighty degrees, unable to do anything but watch.

“Clear.”

His fault. If he hadn’t gotten so close—

“Clear.”

“I can’t Rumor him into staying alive,” Allison weeps, leaning on Vanya for support.

“Clear.”

Klaus feels the tentacle marks on his wrists, his neck, his head. His fault. His fault.

“Clear—”

“Stop.” Reginald’s voice rings out over the huddled mass. He’s holding a pocket watch and staring at it intently. “It’s been long enough. Number Six is not going to come back from this.”

“ _No_ —” the room responds.

In the fading corners of Klaus’s vision, Luther wrestles the paddles from Mom and continues to shock Ben. Diego screams at their father. Allison looks down at Ben with a frozen expression. Vanya, in the corner, hurls.

Klaus, fading fast, the drugs catching up to his bloodstream, still holds onto Ben’s hand. Still hoping.

He can’t feel his head any longer. The numbness spreads to his hands, and he can’t feel them either. He keeps gripping Ben’s hand, hoping for a miracle.

Klaus can’t support his own weight any longer, and he falls to the floor.

Another shock. And then another one.

The heart monitor still sits at a flat line.

Klaus closes his eyes involuntarily.

And Ben squeezes his hand.

Wait—

Klaus tries to open his eyes, tries to voice his gasp of amazement, but he’s crashing too fast.

The monitor stills shows no heartbeat. All around them, the Hargreeves still work to bring Ben back. But Ben was alive, Klaus felt it.

Klaus watches as Ben peels himself from his body in shining blue and turns to look at him.

And the last remnants of his vision succumb to the drugs, yanking Klaus headfirst into a deep unconscious sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> [if you're interested in more, check out my tumblr!](http://rosesskywalker.tumblr.com)


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